Cold Comfort

After my father died, quite unexpectedly, twenty years ago, I started finding some comfort when at night I could see some stars. In those months after his death I could look at the stars and I would remember lying back, Dad and I, on the thwarts of our drifting canoe, on some little lake off the Gunflint Trail, sometime when I was young. The sky was moonless and cloudless and we were hundreds of miles north of our Illinois home, and the stars were blazing. “Makes you feel real big and important, doesn’t it?” was all he said. Then he chuckled.

Now it’s a lifetime or nearly so later, and here in my house the head of the bed is right up under a big triple-pane window. No one pulls any curtains in this neighborhood, except in high summer to help darken the room, so on clear nights in winter I can crane my neck and look out through the glass and beyond the eave, and there they are: stars, galaxies of them, with fathomless black chasms between. The whole shebang just going on. Forever falling into forever. And real big and important me, warm lump in warm bed with my warm wife in our warm log house, peering right over the rim into a bowl of eternity.

Some nights that view is a comfort. On other nights it scares the hell out of me. Most nights, there’s some of both, and I am lucky and grateful to have it so handy, with just a sleepy yawn and a tip of the head.

I pity the billions of people who nowadays never see the stars at all, sequestered as those throngs of humanity are beneath massive domes of electric light –night after night, month after month, year after year. I wonder how they keep their bearings. Honestly, I wonder if they do. I think a nightly or even a thrice-monthly dose of star-gazing would do anyone a world of good. A handful of real big and important earthlings in particular could use a solid month set out adrift in a canoe under the stars right about now. Maybe a solid year, in fact. I could name some names.

Seeing the anonymous swaths of pinprick stars in a dark sky is completely different from looking up at our own star, the sun, or admiring our favorite pet rock, the moon. Those two trustworthy pals never steer my thoughts down the road toward infinity and utter mystery the way a faint star or two can. We circle the sun, the moon circles us, and we tug and pull at each other, play peek-a-boo behind predictable eclipses, mark the ebb and flow of tides, and dance our friendly dance year by year. Solstice, equinox, crescent moon to waxing gibbous, full to waning to new, and round we all go again. Allemande left with the ol’ left hand, as if existence and the universe were orderly, predictable, and, well, all pretty much figgered out. Oh yeah, says a part of me, gimme some o’ that!

The stars brook no such nonsense. Still, I can on some winter nights find a strange cold comfort in the brief sighting of just one of them. Nameless, trivial, out there hundreds of quadrillions of miles distant — and drifting ever away, if I understand the theories correctly. Its faint shred of light, after centuries, finally reaching our window.

Comfort, yes, but strange and cold. And, like I said a little earlier, on other nights that faint star is no comfort to me at all. Not one little bit.